A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

I asked her again, when we were in the tunnel. “Do you feel that Nat is overprotective?”

  She gave me one of her sidelong glances. “That would be an understatement,” she said, at last. “You have to understand that Father is always very busy. The Keeva—your property is extensive and hard to manage, particularly since—”

  “He circumvents some of the more outrageous orders, yes,” I said.

  “Yeah. And Mother is big in the Daughters of Liberty. Her training is in communications and propaganda and . . .” Abigail shrugged. “For some reason, this got Nat thinking that he was as good as a surrogate father to all of us. All of us, even Martha. And me. I mean, I don’t mind his acting like that towards the younger kids, because someone has to look after them and James is too much like Nat and inclined to take the bit between his teeth, but by the founders, Martha is his exact age, and I’m almost their age, and what business does he have treating us like we’re young innocents in need of sheltering? It’s like something doesn’t fit together in his head and he . . . Well, he has this compulsion to . . . When we trained in the countryside, one time, I saw this chicken. She had a clutch of chicks, you know, but she didn’t seem to be satisfied with them, and she kept trying to shove the cat’s three kittens under her wings, too, to protect them. And I looked at her and thought that was Nat to the life.”

  I couldn’t help a chuckle, though it hit me, immediately afterwards, and with sobering certainty that this explained why Nat had devoted so much time to explaining things to me and trying to help me. It wasn’t that he liked me. He’d said, many times, that he didn’t, or at least that he wasn’t sure if he did. But he still tried to protect me—even though I was fourteen years older than he.

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong,” she said. “It’s endearing in a way, and I realize he takes on a great burden, trying to make sure we’re okay, and also that he has saved all of us—except perhaps Martha—from problems. But he tends to manage and . . . parent everyone. He even did to Max, which . . .” The sidelong glance again, and I realized she had no idea what I knew.

  “I know how it was between them,” I said, though I suddenly wondered if I did. I’d assumed the horrible torture that Max’s seeming rejection had been to Nat for a year had come from Nat’s being the dependent member of the relationship. But if he weren’t, what had been working on him? Guilt? Guilt that something had happened to Max and Nat couldn’t save him? That was bad. If it had been just moving his dependence away from a partner who made the decisions and extended him protection—as their relative social positions would indicate—then when he found out that Max was in fact dead; when he executed the body that had been Max’s, he would have been free. But if he felt guilty on the possibility of Max having been brain washed, then finding out Max had been killed, and having to destroy the body to kill the murderer would have increased that guilt to an unbearable amount. Perhaps taking me, metaphorically, under his grubby wing was a psychological attempt to compensate.

  “Which was vaguely creepy,” Abigail completed. She pressed her lips together and looked stern. “I feel very strongly one shouldn’t parent one’s lover.” And to the chuckle this surprised out of me. “You might think I’m silly, but I would hate it horribly, on either of end of that. I don’t want someone I love—when I love someone, that is—to parent me, and I’d hate to do it to them.” She was quiet a moment, while we dropped to a lower level of the tunnel. “Though to be honest, Max didn’t seem to mind. I never knew if he minded it, but put up with it because of Nat, or if he really found it convenient to have Nat tell him when it was time to eat and ask him if he’d remembered to brush his teeth.”

  “No, really,” I said. “He didn’t—”

  “Ask him about brushing his teeth? No. Not since Max was about ten, at least, but he did buy most of Max’s clothes, and told him what to wear when, and Max just . . . let him.”

  “I take it you don’t let him do that? To that extent?” I was thinking of the grey suits all the siblings wore.

  “I hope not,” she said. “But it is awfully convenient, and awfully comfortable, to let other people take care of all your small problems, you know? Before you know it, you’re relying on them, and even when you don’t, it’s like . . . It’s like having a boulder at your back, you know? No one can sneak up behind, and if you’re tired, you can lean back against it. That’s . . . that’s why it’s so odd not to have Nat, not to know if he’s alive or dead. It’s . . . it’s like not knowing if the sun will come out tomorrow.” She turned back to look at me. “Lucius, we must bring Nat back. And he must be alive. He must.”

  I told her what she wanted to hear. Look, I’m as rational as the next man, and as willing to face the truth, but what good would it do to shatter her hope, or even to seed doubt? Would it make it any easier for her to accept Nat’s death, if he was dead? I didn’t think so. If we found Nat dead, it was going to be a reverberating blow anyway, one that would shake her to the core, and possibly me too. All that telling her this was the overwhelming possibility now would do was to make her worry more from the beginning, and perhaps make it harder for her to be effective in rescue, which in turn might assure that even if Nat were alive, he would die when we got him.

  I don’t know about you, but moral purity must always take second place to saving a man’s life, in my consideration. So, I lied. “We will find him, Abigail. And we’ll bring him back alive. I promise you.”

  She rubbed the back of her fingers across her eyes and turned around. “What a fool I’m being. As though you had any choice over whether he’s alive or dead right now, or even if we can get him back alive, even if he is. I shouldn’t ask you stupid questions.”

  “We will bring him back alive, if I have to move heaven and earth and time to do it,” I said, and was shocked to hear the earnestness in my voice which came out somewhere between a whisper and a growl. “If it’s something I can do, I will do it, Abigail.”

  She didn’t turn back, which was a little disappointing after such a dramatic statement on my part. Instead, she nodded. “Yes, let’s get on with it and make haste.” And then added, with disarming frankness, “You see, I’d never realized how important Nat was to me. He’d just . . . He was just always there. I didn’t think about it. I thought . . . I thought he’d always be there. I’m not prepared for the alternative. I’ve already lost Max, who was like a brother to me.”

  Making Haste Strangely

  We were in the fifth broomer bar of the night. Which is to say that all the broomer bars we’d been in so far were starting to run together in my mind.

  It wasn’t that difficult. Broomer bars are, if not all alike, all of a type. They tend to be in the lower economic areas of seacities, and sometimes of natural islands. For all I know there are several on continents too—brooms would seem to be a damn good idea when getting over vast, sparsely populated regions. But my area, the area I’d spent my broomer years in, and the area I was interested in right now, was not near a continent, so I didn’t know.

  Broomer bars were always in the lower class area, often in the parts that had been roofed over by the construction of platforms for new development. They tended to be sparsely decorated—though one or two of them, perhaps being owned by people with aspirations to ambience, had pictures of brooms on the walls. Or pictures of bosomy girls riding brooms in the type of outfit that was guaranteed to give them frostbite within two seconds, even at lower altitudes and lower speeds. Perhaps my lack of appreciation for the art had to do with the fact that it did nothing for me. Or perhaps I had the type of mind that would analyze the incongruence of such pictures even if they depicted male broomers in next to nothing. I rather suspected that. It was a handicap.

  But I wasn’t going to be able to test the theory in this particular bar, oh, so not originally called Brooming It and located in the lowest reaches of Syracuse Seacity, probably not more than a few meters of dimatough up from whatever remained of Never-Never. I might have been able to, if the owners had been inclined
to art, because it took me about five seconds—I’m slow that way—after we went in, to realize that the clientele was almost exclusively male, that the broomer suits, even if not necessarily expensive, were better tailored than the ones we’d been seeing, suggesting used suits got fixed to fit the new owners, and that Abigail was not getting the normal-wide eyed wolfish looks, but rather puzzled stares.

  Abigail must have realized the nature of the place at about the same time, because she looked back at me, a startled expression in her eyes. I grinned back at her, reassuringly. “You might have to protect me,” I said. And someone—Nat, when we got him back—would have to cure the girl of that unladylike snort.

  I leaned down, to speak in her ear. “We won’t stay long,” I said. “Since it’s unlikely you’ll know anyone here, right?” I knew there were exclusively male, exclusively homosexual broomers’ lairs. The best known was perhaps the Lavender Buzzers, which had approached Ben and me to join, way back when. They were, however, big time serious broomers, with the sort of connections that allowed them to get squeeze from drug transports in order not to get robbed. Though they knew us only by our first names, if we joined, they would sooner or later attract attention they didn’t need. It was a bad combination all around. Neither Ben or I needed the money or had the drive—at least I didn’t—that impelled the rest of them. And having us aboard would call attention to them. Which considering in how many places in the world attraction for a member of the same sex fell under capital crimes or just short of it, would be unfair to them. And to us. But I’d had friends in the Buzzers and a half dozen other lairs. I just hadn’t socialized much outside my own lair so I hadn’t frequented the watering places.

  She nodded tightly, but whispered back, “But you never know, so let’s get a drink?”

  I nodded, and we started elbowing our way to the counter at the other end of the bar. This meant cutting in the middle of several conversations and squeezing gingerly past people in a clinch. I wondered how carefully raised Abigail had been and if I was giving her the shock of her life, but to be honest, she didn’t seem to be even surprised or curious. Though perhaps that was the unflappable quality Ben used to have, where you’d never know you’d caught him off guard until days, or sometimes months after, when he chose to talk about it.

  I put my arm over her shoulders, nonetheless, to pull her past the tighter knots of people.

  We’d just made it to the counter, and I’d ordered single malt, straight up, not bothering to give a brand, because they were not likely to have more than one brand handy. Abigail was ordering something that required explaining what a Pink Upright was—what did she think she was doing, exactly?—and I was about to cut her off and point out that perhaps she should go with a glass of wine, when a voice called behind me, “Luce? Ben?”

  I turned around. Coming towards us, elbowing his way, was a somewhat modified version of what used to be a familiar face. What surprised me was not that he’d got a few pounds stouter, or that his hair had receded to the point that the pony tail that gathered it in the back looked like an afterthought. No, what puzzled me was that I immediately retrieved a name to go with the face. Not his last name, of course. If I’d ever known that, and I doubted it, because it wasn’t how broomers worked, it’d never got used and I’d since forgotten it. But he’d been known, in broomer circles as Birt the Bat, for reasons known only to himself and possibly his mental med tech, if he had one. Most of these names were self-bestowed, and there was nothing even vaguely batlike about Birt. Mouse maybe.

  He’d been, when I’d last seen him, a cute young man, with emphasis on young, perhaps all of eighteen, but looking younger, with light brown hair, an oval face, and the sort of slim build that suggests growth will still happen. Growth hadn’t happened. Not upwards.

  Strangely his cheeks filling in hadn’t made him less mouselike, either. He just looked like a contented middle-aged mouse who didn’t spend too much time running on his wheel, because that was for the young.

  His expression flickered minimally as I turned around, as though for just a moment he weren’t sure who I really was. But then he nodded, as though to reassure himself, and said, “I knew it. Lucky Luce. Where have you been hiding yourself. And . . . Ben?”

  But Abigail turned around and Birt gave me an uncertain look. I didn’t know if, in this light, and with Abigail in broomer suit he’d spotted the crucial difference between her and Ben, but her age was obvious. I cleared my throat. “Birt, this is Abigail, she’s Ben’s . . . uh . . .” I cast about madly, and decided it wasn’t any use complicating matters with mention of Ben’s brother. We tried to keep mention of family to a minimum in broomer circles, even back then when there was less cause to obscure our identity. Besides, Ben supplied in my mind sister. Just say it. Easier to make a joke out of it. You don’t want seventy questions about my family. Even if it were safe. You want to stir the conversation. “This is Ben’s sister,” I said, firmly.

  Birt jumped a little. “Oh, then . . . oh, then . . . And Ben? You two are still together?”

  “As together as ever,” I said, and my hand went into my pocket for the flag in its box.

  Birt grinned. “Oh. Well. And you, that is . . .”

  “Abby’s just starting out on the brooms, and I’m showing her the ropes,” I said. And I really, really, really needed to get her snort under control. She smothered it in whatever pink concoction she was drinking, but even Birt might notice it at some point.

  A few minutes later, we were sitting at one of the tables, on the outskirts of the crowd, drinking and talking. Making up a history and a vague, general reason why Ben and I hadn’t been around wasn’t that hard. I told him we’d had to raise Abigail. I made some comment about needing dough and having taken—I dug in my mind for the most dangerous and out of the way jobs I could think of—mineral scouting jobs in the middle of old Europe, jobs that were done mostly on foot or broom, living in tents.

  “Man, that must have been rough,” Birt said. “No wonder you look like you’ve had a fight with steamroller and the steamroller won.”

  Like he looks much better, Ben said, in my mind, his voice sounding stung at the implication that my looks were less than wonderful. Exactly how many people did he eat to get to be that size?

  I ignored Ben, because even in a broomer bar, people get worried when you talk to someone no one else can see, and instead said mildly, “Yes, but much easier to explain two men raising a young girl without getting too many questions asked, right.” Abigail, thank heavens, didn’t feel a need to either help or hinder with my invention. Her gaze, across the table, showed a vague kind of admiration for my imagination. Or perhaps alarm at the past I’d just given her. As for me, I wished it could have been true. I had a feeling roaming around alone with Ben would have been fun, even when it got rough. And raising Abigail would have been fun too. And, undoubtedly, rough.

  Birt believed it. Well, what reason did he have not to?

  Then came the obligatory catching up with what had happened to various people I could no longer even remember, and Birt telling me about some guy or other he was apparently living with.

  It was Abigail in the end who stirred the conversation towards arrests and prison breaks, by talking about the Brooms of Doom and the break into Never-Never.

  “You’re with the Doomers, now?” Birt said, looking over our suits with their red piping. “Good outfit. Not very active usually, you know, and people have sometimes accused them of being lightweights, but that break into Never-Never was a thing of beauty. Man, we didn’t even know it existed, and I guess it was mostly political stuff,” he pronounced political with all syllables distinctly separated as though it were an alien word and a strange concept. “But a few people I know were sprung, and, man, do they tell rough tales. Good thing for the Doomers to have broken them out.”

  From there it was a hop, a skip and a jump, to talk about people who had been arrested recently and any weird events they’d witnessed, and I shocked myself
by managing it as adroitly as Sam might have. Abigail helped. The pink whatevers didn’t seem to have muddled her wits, though she ordered a second one, and she was showing a marked tendency to snort and giggle more. I noted that Birt seemed to give her way too appreciative looks, which just shows you never know, and put it in reserve at the back of my head, in case at some point I had to give him the punch that Sam and Nat would have wished me to. But he never overstepped the line, and he might not even have been aware of the interest in his gaze.

  Encouraged, he told us several long, pointless tales about the very best prisons to end up in, and the very worst ones—for a highly subjective idea of best and worst, considering the main attraction in one of the prisons seemed to be a really hot guard.

  And then we hit pay dirt, with a suddenness that left me breathless. “Only Sanders the Snake, remember him, with the Buzzers? No. Wait, he was after your time. He’s a righteous flyer, nonetheless, never at a loss, and good in a pinch, you know.” And again, I wished that Abigail would control her snort, particularly her snort-giggle. “Anyway, he was arrested. Minor matter, nothing to jump about, just you know, a few kilos of oblivium in possession.”

  If possession of oblivium, particularly in the kilo range, was a minor matter, then things had got far more interesting in the years I’d been away. Because when it came to illegal drugs, oblivium had been in a special category by itself. Most drugs were forbidden. Tons of things were forbidden in the seacities. It gave the Good Men a reason to arrest you if they wanted to for whatever purpose. But most of the drug consumption and possession was ignored most of the time. It was rumored, and I now knew it was true, that the Good Men owned most of the drug creation facilities and farms and controlled what got into the market.

  I’d got to know this was true because the introduction of oblivium had been one of the stabilizing measures engineered by my father. Population stabilizing for one, because oblivium use came not only with a sky-high mortality rate—the fun and the lethal dose were that close together—but with more regularity than would be considered good by anyone but my father, it induced homicidal fits, which had the advantage of taking out vast swaths of other people who didn’t use the drug. In fact, at our trial and possibly in the media, Ben and I had been portrayed as under oblivium influence while committing the murders.